dimanche 23 février 2014

Source Daily Mail by Uma Nair
Christies Asian Art Week in New York promises to bring in intrigue and interest with two important sales that put the spotlight on contemporary Indian Art. The Rockfeller Galleries in Manhattan will host South Asian modern and contemporary art along with Souza sale from the Shelley Souza collection on March 18, 2014.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

samedi 22 février 2014

Source The New Indian Express by Shyama Krishna Kumar
There are still many reasons to fall in love with Bangalore. Walking into the Manikyavelu Mansion, located on Palace Road, one can immediately feel a combination of peace and serenity descend. The swaying branches of the Gulmohars, Peepal and jamuns, the gorgeous fountains, the twin rows of white pillars that hold up the majestic, colonial style mansion arrest your senses and hold you prisoner for the rest of your time here.
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Source Artforum by Zehra Jumabhoy
Inside the tented enclosures, the fair was in full swing. Its opening preview afforded all the trappings of success. Certainly, lots of designer-clad local celebs could be glimpsed in the crush: the bejewelled art patron Feroze Gujral and Kiran Nadar (owner of the eponymously named private museum) jostled amid the usual run up of “glocal” talent: Reena Kallat in a flowing blouse; Jitish Kallat (the artist director of this year’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale) doing his rounds; the ubiquitous Subodh Gupta (he of the shiny bartans, many of which were on display); Bharti Kher; Nalini Malani and the photographer Dayanita Singh. And there were the stalwarts: art historian Geeta Kapur with her hubby, artist Vivan Sundaram; Bombay-born cultural theorist Homi Bhabha. A mandatory sprinkling of “international” grandees—the Tate Modern’s Chris Dercon and Asia Society’s Melissa Chiu—rubbed shoulders with artists like London filmmaker John Akomfrah and Superflex’s Rasmus Nielson.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

jeudi 20 février 2014

Source Business Day by Georgina Adam
Also last week, the India Art Fair held in New Delhi, was the first opportunity this year to assess the state of the art market in the subcontinent. Galleries readily admit last year was tough for them, and the overhang of the 2008 debacle, when the "India art boom" collapsed, was still apparent. "Prices for contemporary art crashed by up to 70% ," says Kishore Singh of the Delhi Art Gallery, which had a huge stand. "As for the modern artists, their prices dropped by about 20% but are gradually coming back. Still, collectors are bargaining very hard." The gallery displayed modern Indian art, which was accompanied by a doorstopper book documenting the works. "Art education is nonexistent here so we are doing it ourselves," says Singh. Most of the other exhibitors displayed contemporary art and local tastes predominated, with often kitschy and colourful creations. A number of previous international exhibitors had not returned, and some good Indian galleries, such as Project 88, did not appear either. Lelong of Paris, despite its solo show of Nalini Malani, said business was average.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

mardi 18 février 2014

Source Mydigitalfc by Ritwik Mukherjee
When it comes to Indian art’s maestros, Raza rules. As was proved yet again this Tuesday when his artwork on paper sold at the Saffronart auction for a thumping Rs 5.75 crore, creating a new world record. The auctioneers claimed that this auction of modern Indian masters grossed a total of Rs 30.32 crore in all. The bidding for two back to back auctions was conducted in an auction room, online and over telephone, for six hours at a premier Mumbai hotel. “A surge in excitement was palpable as SH Raza’s Haut De Cagnes, the highlight of the evening sale, appeared on the screens. Competitive bidding between room and phone bidders drove it to a value of Rs 5.75 crores ($942.623), a world record for an Indian artwork on paper,” a communique from the auctioneers said.
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Source The Indian Express by Gayatri Rangachari Shah
Although it hardly falls into the bracket of glamorous cities typically associated with the international art world, Dhaka hosted a resoundingly successful art pow wow earlier this month. Billed as the largest South Asian art event in the world, the second Dhaka Art Summit, held from February 7 to 9, drew an audience of 70,000 locals and a global community of art curators, museum administrators, collectors, auction houses and gallerists. Two hundred and fifty artists from South Asia participated, and there were 14 solo art projects by artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Nepal.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

mercredi 12 février 2014

Source News Track India
Born in Budapest to a Sikh father from an aristocratic, land-owing family, and a Hungarian mother, Sher-Gil's life veered between Europe and India. Dalmia, who has also written a biography of the artist "Amrita Sher-Gil - A Life", has approached her artistic journey by taking four different perspectives: Threshold, Icon and Iconoclastic, Hungarian Manifestation and Indian Journey.
"Threshold captures her Paris phase when she was still under training and was trying to master the technique. In the Indian journey section, one can see how she burst into colours after coming to India. This is also the time when she started looking at the life of women in India," Dalmia added. Sher-Gil's works always focussed on women and marganalised people, she observed.
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Source Mid Day by Fatema Pittalwala
The picturesque village of Ganjad, almost 13 km from Dahanu Road station, is bustling with activity. The usually quiet Ashram School in the village is filled with laughter, with students who evidently prefer painting their classroom walls rather than studying. The school is currently hosting a group of Japanese and Indian artists, who have come together to paint the school walls. This is an initiative by The Wall Art Project, a non-profit organisation (NPO) from Japan, whose aim is to promote education and enhance a child’s creativity through painting.
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Source Wall Art Festival
The Artists of the wall art festival will talk on the 24st of February and the exhibition from 27th February to 4th March, 2012 at the Japan Foundation. The wall art festival is held at Niranjana Public Welfare School - a private elementary school in Sujata village in Bihar which is an art and social development project . The main objective of the project remains to convey the power of art in the developing area. Every year Indian and Japanese artists paint on the white walls of different classrooms which is then put as an exhibition.
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Source The New Indian Express by S Guru Srikanth
In a bid to revive, conserve and promote ancient tribal art forms in Andhra Pradesh, tourism department has proposed two multi-crore projects to the Planning Commission of India as part of rural tourism promotion, which had agreed in principal to them. "There are hardly 500 people now, who practice the art. The current generation of those families are diversifying into other occupations having not much interest in the art form. To revive the interest and make the art form more economically viable, we have proposed the project" Madhusudan said.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

jeudi 6 février 2014

Source Zee News
For collaboration on modern and contemporary art, the union culture ministry Thursday signed an agreement with Tate, an institution that houses Britain`s national art collection. "This agreement is part of a series of international collaborations undertaken by the culture ministry which would strengthen the museum sector in the country and lead to a cross pollination of ideas," said ministry secretary Ravindra Singh. The two parties agreed to cooperate on institution to institution basis in areas of common interest, including exhibitions, scholarly research, fellowships, collection care, learning programmes and loans, an official statement said. "This agreement will support the reciprocal exchange of ideas and knowledge in the field of modern and contemporary art in India and Britain, allowing deeper engagement with art for audiences in both nations," said Tate director Nicholas Serota.
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Source The New York Times by Gayatri Rangachary Shah
Neha Kirpal, founder of the India Art Fair, wasn’t fazed by the criticism about the quality of art this year. An art world novice when she founded the fair six years ago, Ms. Kirpal said that her goal was to make the market more democratic. “This is a domestic fair for a domestic audience,” she said. “The art scene here is small and the preference is not to exclude galleries right away. “We could have made it very exclusive and have only the absolute best, in which case from India there would be 20 galleries that made that cut. But that’s precisely the problem — the art world is inaccessible. I am that public that was too intimidated to walk into a gallery as a young person growing up in India.”
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Source The Hindu by Ziya Us Salam
This is that time of the year when literature festivals dot the landscape from Jaipur to Chennai, from Mumbai to Kolkata, not to forget Bengaluru, Lucknow and Patna. Add to that the India Art Fair in Delhi and life resembles one big mela. With authors and poets, painters and sculptors occupying all the mindspace, it is not an easy task to get the redoubtable Homi Bhabha to agree to a leisurely lunch at The Royal Plaza in New Delhi. But the genial humanist agrees, squeezing out time between a session with Vivan Sundaram at the Art Fair and a post-lunch meeting with veteran Kapila Vatsyayan.
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Source The Art Newspaper by Anny Shaw
“I always tell people: ‘If you are not interested in politics, politics is certainly interested in you’,” says Nalini Malani, the Mumbai and Amsterdam-based artist whose work on show in Delhi addresses women’s rights. Malani opened two exhibitions there last week, and had work in the city’s India Art Fair, which closed on 2 February. “You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag”, Malani’s first retrospective in India, opened at the private Kiran Nadar Museum of Art on 30 January (until 30 November).
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

lundi 3 février 2014

Source India Blooms
The first edition of the Forbes India Art Awards (FIAA), an initiative in the Indian art world, concluded on Friday, unveiling winners across 14 categories of Indian art. The winners of the first ever Forbes India Art Awards are: Young Collector of the Year: Anurag Khanna. For his commitment and risk taking ability in collecting different types of art including video art. Contemporary Gallery of the Year – Experimenter, Kolkata. For their work in highlighting experimental and alternative artists from the entire South Asian subcontinent. Gallery of the Year – Talwar Gallery, New Delhi. For their ideological and visual spectra expressed through the gallery’s exhibitions in 2013 that have been well received by the international media and major museums worldwide. Not-for-Profit Art Initiative of the Year – Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). For their work in encouraging, promoting and supporting innovative work in the field of the visual arts. Corporate Commitment of the Year: GVK. For converting the 4,39,000 square metres of space at Terminal 2 of the Mumbai International Airport into a large installation of art works. Auction of the Year: Christie’s first auction in India, south Asian Art Dec 19, 2013, Mumbai. Emerging Curator of the Year: Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma, founding directors and curators at The Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, a not-for-profit space that opened in 2010.The jury also made a special mention of the contribution of curator Shanay Jhaveri. Exhibition of Indian Art Curated on an International Stage: Ram Rahman and Jessica Moss, for 'The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989'...
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Source The Hindustan Times by Mugdha Variyar
Is that a wheel? Is that a cycle? It's a charkha! More than 60 children between the ages of five and 10 learned about Mahatma Gandhi in a unique way at the book launch of My Gandhi Story, held at Kitab Khana on Sunday, day two of the Hindustan Times Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. Authored by children's writer Nina Sabnani and storyteller Ankit Chadha, with Warli illustrations by artist Rajesh Vangad, the book and the launch event were a treat for the young visitors, many of whom were hearing about Gandhi's life in detail for the first time. Some had even initally mistaken the charkha for a bicycle.
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Publié par
Herve Perdriolle

dimanche 2 février 2014

Source Livemint by Sanjukta Sharma
Priyanka Choudhary travelled to seats of extreme violence around the world—Tlatelolco (Mexico), Soweto (South Africa), Ypres (Belgium), New York’s Ground Zero and Jallianwala Bagh (in Punjab)—and put up performance pieces there. This show is a record of those performances in the form of photographs and video. The artist says: “The monuments to extreme violence are only too peaceful. They are placid lakes. Blind spots. I threw a small stone to ruffle the surface.... People gathered around me forgot to smirk. Peace had been disturbed for the better, I hope.” The seat of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar had graffiti and litter when she visited. She noticed an ancient banyan tree next to the site, which struck her as a silent testament to the carnage, and to the violent tides of the world thereafter. She tied herself to the tree and allowed people to see her and react to her.
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Source Times of India by Neelam Raaj
Winter is the season for art-shart in Delhi, and the India Art Fair (IAF) has become one of the biggest events on the capital's calendar. Hundreds of people -- including artists, critics, museum directors and curators with collectors in tow, and even the odd Bollywood actor (Sonam Kapoor) -- turned up for the invitation-only opening on Friday afternoon. Dressed up in suits and dresses, or dressed down in jeans and sandals, they filled the aisles; some to buy and others to see and be seen.
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Source The Guardian by John Elliott
Delhi’s annual India Art Fair, which closed tonight, is as important for the focus it brings to Indian art and for other events that happen at the same time across the city as it is for the show itself, which has settled into a predictable mould in its sixth year. Indeed, the exhibitions away from the fair grounds that are featuring leading modern and contemporary artists are more exciting than the fair itself, which this year has lacked dramatic new contemporary displays. In a depressed market, galleries have been showing conventional works and there has been some criticism of a lack of consistent quality, especially with Indian galleries – “kitsch” was the unkind word used by one critic to describe some exhibits, responding to me saying it was all very “predictable”.
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This newsletter posted by Hervé Perdriolle in October 2007, tracks the news of the Indian Contemporary Art through an international press review regularly updated.Since 2008 more than 1.800 press articles listed - 145.000 pages viewed.